health tech

Why does most enterprise technology feel like it is a decade behind consumer technology? For the same reason our health care system is broken. The “user” isn’t the same person as the “buyer”. In enterprise software the user is generally a non-IT person but the buyer is usually, at least in part, the IT department.* (In healthcare the “user” is the patient and the “buyer” is the doctor or insurance company).

SAP bought SuccessFactors today, in a big win for “cloud” based enterprise software. The cloud might sound like a buzzword but is in fact a vastly superior architecture, not because it makes installation and updates easier (although that’s good too), but because it starts to remove IT from the purchasing process, meaning the user and the buyer are, increasingly, the same person.

* A corollary to this is that IT-related enterprise software, i.e. infrastructure, is generally pretty good.